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• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Key Terms
• Foreword
• The Manuscripts of Tocqueville
• Some Details Concerning the Present Edition
• Abbreviations and Symbols Used In This Edition
• Note On the Manuscripts
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Editor’s Introduction
• I: Legacies
• II: To Understand the Revolution
• Democracy In America a (1835), Volume I]: Part I
• Introduction a
• Chapter 1: Exterior Configuration of North America
• Chapter 2: Of the Point of Departure and Its Importance For the Future of the Anglo-americans a
• Reasons For Some Singularities That the Laws and Customs B of the Anglo-americans Present
• Chapter 3: Social State of the Anglo-americans
• That the Salient Point of the Social State of the Anglo-americans Is to Be Essentially Democratic
• Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-americans
• Chapter 4: Of the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People In America
• Chapter 5: Necessity of Studying What Happens In the Individual States Before Speaking About the Government of the Union a
• Of the Town System In America C
• Town District
• Town Powers In New England
• Of Town Life
• Of Town Spirit In New England
• Of the County In New England
• Of Administration In New England a
• General Ideas On Administration In the United States
• Of the State
• Legislative Power of the State
• Of the Executive Power of the State
• Of the Political Effects of Administrative Decentralization In the United States C
• Chapter 6 A: of the Judicial Power In the United States and Its Action On Political Society B
• Other Powers Granted to American Judges
• Chapter 7: Of Political Jurisdiction In the United States Tn 4
• Chapter 8: Of the Federal Constitution
• Historical Background of the Federal Constitution a
• Summary Picture of the Federal Constitution J
• Attributions of the Federal Government
• Federal Powers
• Legislative Powers: R [difference Between the Constitution of the Senate and That of the House of Representatives]
• Another Difference Between the Senate and the House of Representatives W
• Of Executive Power 16
• How the Position of the President of the United States Differs From That of a Constitutional King In France
• Accidental Causes That Can Increase the Influence of the Executive Power
• Why the President of the United States, to Lead Public Affairs, Does Not Need to Have a Majority In the Chambers
• Of the Election of the President
• Mode of Election
• Election Crisis
• Of the Re-election of the President
• Of the Federal Courts 24
• Way of Determining the Jurisdiction Tn 5 of the Federal Courts
• Different Cases of Jurisdiction
• The Federal Courts’ Way of Proceeding
• Elevated Rank That the Supreme Court Occupies Among the Great Powers of the State
• How the Federal Constitution Is Superior to the State Constitutions
• What Distinguishes the Federal Constitution of the United States of America From All Other Federal Constitutions
• Of the Advantages of the Federal System In General, and of Its Special Utility For America M
• What Keeps the Federal System From Being Within the Reach of All Peoples; and What Has Allowed the Anglo-americans to Adopt It

That the Salient Point of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans Is to Be Essentially Democratic

Several important remarks about the social state of the Anglo-Americans could be made, but one dominates all the others.d

The social state of the Americans is eminently democratic. It has had this character since the birth of the colonies; it has it even more today.e

[≠As soon as you look at the civil and political society of the United States, you discover two great facts that dominate all the others and from which the others are derived. Democracy constitutes the social state; the dogma of the sovereignty of the people, the political law.

These two things are not analogous. Democracy is society’s way of being. Sovereignty of the people, a form of [v. the essence of] government. Nor are they inseparable, because democracyf is even more compatible with despotism than with liberty.

But they are correlative. Sovereignty of the people is always more or less a fiction wherever democracy is not established.≠]g

I said in the preceding chapter that a very great equality reigned among the emigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England. Not even the germ of aristocracy was ever deposited in that part of the Union. No influences except intellectual ones [{a kind of intellectual patronage}] could ever be established there. The people got used to revering certain names, as symbols of learning and virtue. The voice of certain citizens gained a power over the people that perhaps could have been correctly called aristocratic, if it could have been passed down invariably from father to son.

This happened [{north}] east of the Hudson; [{south}] southwest of this river, and as far down as Florida, things were otherwise.

In most of the States situated southwesth of the Hudson, great English landholders had come to settle. Aristocratic principles, and with them English laws of inheritance, had been imported.[*] I have shown the reasons that prevented a powerful aristocracy from ever being established in America. But these reasons, though existing southwestj of the Hudson, had less power there than [{north}] east of this river. To the south, one man alone could, with the help of slaves, cultivate a large expanse of land. So in this part of the continent wealthy landed proprietors were seen; but their influence was not precisely aristocratic, as understood in Europe, because they had no privileges at all, and cultivation by slaves gave them no tenants and therefore no patronage. Nonetheless, south of the Hudson, the great landholders formed a superior class, with its own ideas and tastes and generally concentrating political activity within its ranks. It was a kind of aristocracy not much different from the mass of the people whose passions and interests it easily embraced, exciting neither love nor hate;k in sum, weak and not very hardy. It was this class that, in the South, put itself at the head of the insurrection; the American Revolution owed its greatest men to it.

In this period, the entire society was shaken.m The people, in whose name the struggle was waged, the people—now a power—conceived the desire to act by themselves; democratic instincts awoke.n By breaking the yoke of the home country, the people acquired a taste for all kinds of independence. Little by little, individual influences ceased to make themselves felt; habits as well as laws began to march in unison toward the same end.

But it was the law of inheritance that pushed equality to its last stage.o

I am astonished that ancient and modern political writers have not attributed a greater influence on the course of human affairs to the laws of landed inheritance.1 These laws belong, it is true, to the civil order; but they should be placed at the head of all political institutions, for they have an incredible influence on the social state of peoples, political laws being just the expression of the social state. In addition, the laws of inheritance have a sure and uniform way of operating on society; in a sense they lay hold of generations before their birth. Through them, man is armed with an almost divine power over the future of his fellows. The law-maker regulates the inheritance of citizens once, and he remains at rest for centuries: his work put in motion, he can keep his hands off; the machine acts on its own power, and moves as if self-directed toward an end set in advance.

Constituted in a certain way, the law of inheritance reunites, concentrates, gathers property and, soon after, power, around some head; in a way it makes aristocracy spring from the soil. Driven by other principles and set along another path, its action is even more rapid; it divides, shares, disseminates property and power. Sometimes people are then frightened by the rapidity of its march. Despairing of stopping its movement, they seek at least to create difficulties and obstacles before it; they want to counterbalance its action with opposing efforts; useless exertions! It crushes or sends flying into pieces all that gets in its way; it constantly rises and falls on the earth until nothing is left in sight but a shifting and intangible dustp on which democracy takes its seat.

When the law of inheritance allows and, even more, requires the equal division of the father’s property among all the children, its effects are of two sorts; they should be carefully distinguished, even though they lead to the same end.

Due to the law of inheritance, the death of each owner leads to a revolution in property; not only do the holdings change masters, but so to speak, they change nature; they are constantly split into smaller portions. [The generations grow poorer as they succeed each other.]

That is the direct and, in a sense, the material effect of the law.q So in countries where legislation establishes equal division, property and particularly territorial fortunes necessarily have a permanent tendency to grow smaller. Nonetheless, if the law were left to itself, the effects of this legislation would make themselves felt only over time. Because as long as the family includes not more than two children (and the average for families in a populated country like France, we are told, is only three),r these children, sharing the wealth of their father and their mother, will be no less wealthy than each parent individually.

But the law of equal division exerts its influence not on the fate of property alone; it acts on the very soul of the proprietors, and calls their passions to its aid. These indirect effects rapidly destroy great fortunes and, above all, great estates.s

Among peoples for whom the inheritance law is based on the right of primogeniture, landed estates most often pass from generation to generation without being divided. That causes family spirit to be, in a way, embodied in the land. The family represents the land; the land represents the family; the land perpetuates its name, origin, glory, power and virtues. It is an undying witness to the past and a precious guarantee of life to come.t

When the inheritance law establishes equal division, it destroys the intimate connection that existed between family spirit and keeping the land; the land ceases to represent the family, for the land, inescapably divided after one or two generations, clearly must shrink continually and disappear entirely in the end. The sons of a great landed proprietor, if they are few, or if fortune favors them, can maintain the hope of not being poorer than their progenitor, but not of owning the same lands as he; their wealth will necessarily consist of other elements than his.u

Now, from the moment you take away from landed proprietors any great interest—arising from sentiment, memory, pride, or ambition—in keeping the land, you can be sure that sooner or later they will sell it. They have a great pecuniary interest in selling, since movable assets produce more income than other assets and lend themselves much more easily to satisfying the passions of the moment.v

Once divided, great landed estates are never reassembled; for the small landholder gains proportionately more revenue from his field2 than the large landholder; so he sells it at a much higher price than the large landholder. Thus the economic calculations that brought a rich man to sell vast properties, will prevent him, with all the more reason, from buying small properties in order to reassemble large estates.w

What is called family spirit is often based on an illusion of individualegoism.x A person seeks to perpetuate and, in a way, to immortalize himself in his great-nephews.y Where family spirit ends, individual egoism reverts to its true inclinations. Since the family no longer enters the mind except as something vague, indeterminate, and uncertain, each man concentrates on present convenience; he considers the establishment of the generation immediately following, and nothing more.

So a person does not try to perpetuate his family, or at least he tries to perpetuate it by means other than landed property.

Thus, not only does the inheritance law make it difficult for families to keep the same estates intact, but also it removes the desire to try and leads families, in a way, to cooperate in their own ruin.

The law of equal division proceeds in two ways: by acting on the thing, it acts on the man; by acting on the man, it affects the thing.

In these two ways it succeeds in profoundly attacking landed property and in making families as well as fortunes rapidly disappear.3

Surely it is not up to us, the French of the nineteenth century, daily witnesses to the political and social changes that the inheritance law brings about, to question its power. Each day we see it constantly move back and forth over our soil, toppling in its path the walls of our dwellings and destroying the hedges of our fields. But if the inheritance law has already accomplished much among us, much still remains for it to do. Our memories, opinions, and habits present it with powerful obstacles.z

In the United States, its work of destruction is nearly finished. That is where its principal results can be studied.

English legislation on the transmission of property was abolished in nearly all the states at the time of the Revolution.

The law of entail was modified so as to interfere only imperceptibly with the free circulation of property.a^G

The first generation disappeared; landed estates began to divide. As time went by, the movement became more and more rapid [as a stone thrown from the top of a tower accelerates as it moves through space]. Today, when hardly sixty years have gone by, the appearance of society is already unrecognizable; the families of the great landed proprietors are almost entirely engulfed by the common mass. In the state of New York, which had a very large number of such families, two barely stay afloat above the abyss ready to swallow them.b Today, the sons of these opulent citizens are businessmen, lawyers, doctors. Most have fallen into the most profound obscurity. The last trace of hereditary rank and distinction is destroyed; the law of inheritance has done its leveling everywhere.c

It is not that there are no rich in the United States as there are elsewhere; I do not even know of a country where the love of money holds a greater place in the human heart and where a deeper contempt is professed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.d But wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and experience teaches that it is rare to see two generations reap the rewards of wealth.e [{The people are like the divinity of this new world; everything emanates from and returns to them.}]

This picture, however colored you think it is, still gives only an incomplete idea of what is happening in the new states of the West and Southwest.f

At the end of the last century, hardy adventurers began to penetrate the valleys of the Mississippi. This was like a new discovery of America: soon the bulk of emigration went there; you saw unknown societies suddenly emerge from the wilderness. States, whose names did not even exist a few years before, took a place within the American Union. [<≠Hardly a year passed without the republic being forced to have some new star attached to its flag.≠>] In the West democracy can be observed carried to its extreme limit. In these states, in a way improvised by chance, the inhabitants arrived but yesterday on the soil they occupy. They scarcely know each other, and each one is unaware of the history of his closest neighbor. So in this part of the American continent, the population escapes not only from the influence of great names and great wealth, but also from the natural aristocracy that arises from enlightenment and virtue. There, no one exercises the power that men grant out of respect for an entire life spent in doing good before their eyes. The new states of the West already have inhabitants; society still does not exist.

But not only fortunes are equal in America; to a certain degree, equality extends to minds themselves.

I do not think there is any country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there exist so small a number of ignorant and fewer learned men than in America.

There primary education is available to every one; higher education is hardly available to anyone.

This is easily understood and is, so to speak, the necessary result of what we advanced above.

Nearly all Americans live comfortably; so they can easily gain the primary elements of human knowledge.

In America, there are few rich [≠and the rich do not form a class apart. The consequences of this fact in relation to education are of several kinds.≠]; nearly all Americans need to have an occupation. Now, every occupation requires an apprenticeship. So Americans can devote only the first years of life to general cultivation of the mind; at age fifteen, they begin a career; most often, therefore, their education concludes when ours begins. If pursued further, it is directed only toward a specialized and lucrative field; they study a field of knowledge in the way they prepare for a trade; and they take only the applications recognized to have immediate utility.

In America, most of the rich began by being poor; nearly all the men of leisure were busy men in their youth. The result is that when they could have the taste for study, they do not have the time to devote themselves to it; and when they have gained the time, they no longer have the taste.

So in America no class exists that honors intellectual work and in which the penchant for intellectual pleasures is handed down with affluence and hereditary leisure.

Both the will and the power to devote oneself to this work are therefore missing.

In America a certain middling level of human knowledge is established. All minds have approached it; some by rising, others by falling.

So you meet a great multitude of individuals who have about the same number of notions in matters of religion, history, the sciences, political economy, legislation, and government.

Intellectual inequality comes directly from God, and man cannot prevent it from always reappearing.

But it follows, at least from what we have just said, that minds, while still remaining unequal as the Creator intended, find equal means at their disposal. Thus, today in America, the aristocratic element, always feeble since its birth, is, if not destroyed, at least weakened further; so it is difficult to assign it any influence whatsoever in the course of public affairs.

Time, events, and the laws have, on the contrary, made the democratic element not only preponderant but also, so to speak, unique. No family or group influence can be seen; often not even an individual influence, no matter how ephemeral, can be found.

[{Society there [is (ed.)] profoundly and radically democratic in its religion, ideas, habits, and passions.g }

≠For a people that has reached such a social state, mixed governments are more or less impractical; hardly any choice exists for them other than absolute power or a republic [v: sovereignty of the people].

America found itself in circumstances fortunate for escaping despotism and favorable for adopting a republic.≠]

So America presents, in its social state, the strangest phenomenon. There, men appear more equal in fortune and in mind or, in other words, more equal in strength than they are in any other country in the world and have been in any century that history remembers.

[d. ]Causes of the social state and current government of America:

• 1.Their origin: excellent point of departure. Intimate mix of religion and of the spirit of liberty. Cold and rational race.
• 2.Their geographic position: no neighbors.
• 3.Their commercial and industrial activity. Everything, even their vices, is favorable to them now.
• 4.The material good fortune that they enjoy.
• 5.The religious spirit that reigns: republican and democratic religion.
• 6.The diffusion of useful knowledge.
• 7.Very pure morals.
• 8.The division into small States. They prove nothing for a large one.
• 9.The absence of a great capital where everything is concentrated. Care to avoid it.
• 10.Commercial and provincial activity that means that each person finds something to do at home (Alphabetic Notebook A, YTC, BIIa and Voyage, OC, V, 1, p. 207).

[e. ] Hervé de Tocqueville:

[f. ] With a reminder in the margin, in pencil: “Explain what is understood by democracy.”

Tocqueville never arrived at a satisfactory definition of democracy. He always used the term in different senses. Harold Laski, in his introduction to Democracy in America (OC, I, p. xxx), distinguishes four; James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (pp. 263-74), identified as many as eight: inevitable development or tendency, social condition, popular sovereignty, government of the people, mobility, middle classes, equality of conditions, open society. Jean-François Sutter, in “Tocqueville et le problème de la démocratie” (Revue internationale de philosophie 49 (1959): 330-40), examined the reason why Tocqueville did not manage to give one single definition of democracy. Cf. the revealing letter of Louis de Kergorlay, dated January 6, 1838, a letter that Tocqueville kept with the early drafts of the second part of his book (YTC, CVg, 2, published in Correspondance avec Kergorlay,OC, XIII, 2, pp. 16-17).

[g. ] In the margin: “≠Note that in this chapter the social state must never be confused with the political laws that follow from it; equality or inequality of conditions, which are facts, with democracy or aristocracy, which are laws. Reexamine from this point of view.≠”

[h. ] This word is added later. At first, the word was south.

[[*]. ] Note from Jefferson.

[j. ] Hervé de Tocqueville:

[k. ] Hervé de Tocqueville:

Édouard de Tocqueville: “I agree with my father only for the last paragraph, which must absolutely be revised. How can a weak and not very hardy class lead an insurrection?” (YTC, CIIIb, 2, pp. 93-94). The author paid no attention to these criticisms; the published version is identical to that in the manuscript.

[m. ] Hervé de Tocqueville:

Édouard de Tocqueville: “Apt observation. This first paragraph must be reworked a bit” (YTC, CIIIb, 2, p. 94).

[n. ] In the margin: “≠It was the aristocracy, if this name can be given to what was then at the head of society in America, which had armed the people and led them on the fields of battle.≠”

[o. ] “Give me, for thirty years, a law for equal division of inheritance and liberty of the press and I will bring you a republic” (YTC, Cve, p. 63).

Tocqueville gives a privileged position to the structure of landed property in his theory. In his Mémoire sur le paupérisme (Commentaire, XXIII, 1983, p. 633), he repeats that it is the concentration of land that provoked the concentration of power and the birth of the aristocracy. The same idea often appears in the notes taken during his journey in America (conversations with Livingston, Clay, Latrobe, Sparks in YTC, BIIa, and Voyage,OC, V, 1, pp. 59, 87-88, 102, 109, 111-13), as well as during his journey in England (Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie,OC, V, 2, pp. 52, 28, 41-42). In a letter to Kergorlay of June 29, 1831 (Correspondance avec Kergorlay,OC, XIII, 1, pp. 231-33), he explains that it is one of the particulars of American society that most surprised him. Moreover, his interest in this question predates the journey to America. The division of the land is already mentioned in the notes of the journey in Sicily in 1827 (Voyage,OC, V, 1, pp. 43, 45). The same idea reappears in his article on the social and political state of France before and after the Revolution of 1789, and in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution.

We know that the social consequences of the inheritance laws have been considered by Aristotle in the Politics (1266b8). Montesquieu took up the question again in De l’esprit des lois (book V, chapters V and VIII). Afterward the question occupied a central place in the political considerations of the revolutionary era. The beginning of the nineteenth century still had in mind the posthumous speech of Mirabeau (Discours de M. de Mirabeau l’ainé sur l’égalité des partages dans les successions en ligne directe, Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, 1791, 23 p.). Even the father of the author had treated it in one of his publications (De la charte provinciale, Paris: J.= J. Blaise, 1829, 62p., pp. 12-13).

[1. ]By the inheritance laws, I understand all the laws whose principal end is to regulate the disposition of property after the death of the owner.

The law of entail is among this number. It is true that it also has the result of preventing the owner from disposing of his property before his death; but it imposes the obligation on him of keeping it only with the view of having it go intact to his inheritor. So the principal end of the law of entail is to regulate the disposition of property after the death of the owner. All the rest is the means used.

[p. ] In the margin in pencil: “This image of dust is exaggerated and lacks precision.”

[q. ] To the side in an earlier draft: “ Explanatory note and on Rodat.”

Is this Rodat Claude Raudot, magistrate and friend of Tocqueville and Beaumont? We can hardly think that the author would misspell the name of someone that he knew so well. Bonnel notes “Rodat” at two places in the drafts (see note s infra). In any case, no one of this name is found in the papers and correspondence of Tocqueville.

[r. ] Hervé de Tocqueville: “Isn’t Alexis considerably underestimating the family average? At least, 4 should be put in place of 3, father, mother and two children. I do not know if the law of averages should be invoked here. The family that has only one descendant escapes from the law of division. But the family that has 5 or 6! What a progression of division of the land!” (YTC, CIIIb, 2, p. 95).

[s. ] Law of inheritance./

Tocqueville will devote a chapter in the second part of his book to the manufacturing aristocracy (chapter XX of volume III). On this point, this note and note d of p. 85 attest to an interest well before the voyage to England in 1835. Tocqueville had briefly visited England in 1833, but the notes of this first journey carry no trace of a particular attention to the problem of industry. It is generally agreed that his visit to Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham in 1835 is at the origin of this interest (Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie,OC, V, 2, pp. 67, 81).

During a conversation with Tocqueville in the United States, Robert Vaux had already referred to the effects of manufacturing on the population (non-alphabetic notebooks 2 and 3, YTC, BIIa and Voyage,OC, V, p. 104). Beaumont, for his part, will not hesitate to affirm in the novel that he would publish in 1835: “In truth there exists in America something that resembles the feudal aristocracy. The factory is the manor; the manufacturer, the sovereign lord; the workers are the serfs” (Marie, I, pp. 241-42).

[t. ] “Ask Livingston if in the United States there is still the possibility of establishing entails [in English in the text (ed.)]” (YTC, CVb, p. 33).

[u. ] See the conversation with Mr. Latrobe (YTC, BIIa and Voyage,OC, V, 1, p. 109).

[v. ] In L’Irlande, Beaumont will recommend the law of equal division as the way to divide property and socially weaken the English aristocracy of Ireland (see especially vol. II, pp. 191-200). Beaumont, like Tocqueville, had also observed in the United States the effects of the inheritance law (cf. in particular two letters, dated respectively July 4 and September 31, 1831, Lettres d’Amérique, pp. 80 and 147).

[2. ] I do not mean that the small landholder cultivates better, but he cultivates with more enthusiasm and care, and gains by work what he lacks in skill.

[w. ] In the margin: “≠The inheritance law acts much more forcefully on the destruction of landed fortunes than of fortunes in general.≠”

[x. ] Hervé de Tocqueville: “I do not believe that the word egoism is the right word here. Egoism is only concerned with the present and does not rush toward the future. The word pride would seem more suitable to me.”

Édouard de Tocqueville: “I find the word egoism good” (YTC, CIIIb, 2, p. 95).

[y. ] Note in pencil in the manuscript that seems to speak about a first version that lacked the sentence to which this note refers: “≠Think about this. A bad inference could be drawn from it, too generalized.≠”

[3. ]Since land is the most secure property, there are, from time to time, wealthy men who are inclined to make great sacrifices to acquire it and who willingly lose a considerable portion of their income in order to assure the rest. But these are accidents. The love of landed property is no longer usually found except among the poor. The small landholder, who is less enlightened and who has less imagination and fewer passions than the large landholder, is generally preoccupied only with the desire to enlarge his domain; and it often happens that inheritance, marriage or turns of fortune in trade provide him the means little by little.

So alongside the tendency that brings men to divide the land, there exists another that brings them to consolidate it. This tendency, which is enough to prevent property from being infinitely divided, is not strong enough to create great territorial fortunes, nor above all to keep them in the same families.

[z. ] Hervé de Tocqueville:

[a. ] [Note] “≠Here citation of Kent and analysis of Lippitt and then a remark on how the French laws on inheritance and entail are more democratic than the American laws.≠” Cf. note G.

In 1834, Tocqueville felt the need to have help in the organization and reading of American books, brochures and codes. The following advertisement is found in one of the notebooks of the copyist Bonnel:

This advertisement seems not to have been published. Francis Lippitt states that he was hired on the recommendation of the American delegation in Paris by Nathaniel Niles or Edward Livingston probably. In a letter to Daniel Gilman (reproduced in Daniel C. Gilman, “Alexis de Tocqueville and his book on America, sixty years after,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 56, May-October 1898, pp. 703-15), Francis Lippitt asserts that his work consisted of reading and summarizing books, newspaper clippings and legal collections. Theodore Sedgwick, another American who had helped the author, unquestionably had a more important role. His conversations seem to have been useful to Tocqueville while drafting certain points of the book. (Also see, George W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, pp. 731-34.)

[b. ] [Note] “≠The Livingstons and the Van Rensselaers.≠”

[c. ] At the time of his voyage, Tocqueville met Charles Carroll, signatory of the Declaration of Independence and one of the wealthiest Americans of the time. On November 8, 1831, Tocqueville, in a draft of a letter to an unidentified recipient, noted concerning him: “[Charles Carroll], a little old man of 95 years, straight as an arrow, . . . saw all the great families disappear as a result of the new inheritance law. For sixty years he has seen their descendants grow poorer, the noble families disappear, and the democracy take hold of the power that the great landholders held in his time” (YTC, BIa2).

[d. ] In the margin: “≠Put here, I think, the inequality arising from the accumulation of the personal wealth of manufacturing.≠”

[e. ] Democracy./

What is most important for democracy, is not that there are no great fortunes; it is that great fortunes do not rest in the same hands. In this way, there are the rich, but they do not form a class.

Commerce, industry perhaps create larger individual fortunes in America now than sixty years ago. However, the abolition of primogeniture and entail make democracy, its passions, interests, maxims, tastes more powerful in our time than sixty years ago.

Furthermore, equality of political rights has introduced a powerful new element of democracy.

American societies had always been democratic by their nature; the Revolution made democratic principles pass into the laws (YTC, CVe, pp. 60-61).

[f. ] Hervé de Tocqueville:

[g. ] In the margin, with a bracket uniting this paragraph with the two preceding ones: “≠To sacrifice, I think, because all of that implies something more than the social state. Ask G[ustave (ed.)]. and L[ouis (ed.)].≠”